👁️Tesla Enters its Memetic Death Spiral

Vibes-based valuation is a double-edge sword. Also: Bankman-Fried in Solitary?; Hayden Davis, Fundamentalist MLMemecoiner; and more.

Tesla stock dropped a staggering 15.4% on Monday, dramatically underperforming losses of 2-3% in broader indexes. I’ve been covering Elon Musk since roughly 2015, and writing about various kinds of fraud and deception at Tesla since not long after that. Today felt like a vindication for many people - the mask is coming off.

Scroll down for my analysis of Tesla, and why the stock is not bouncing back from this. First, a few other news items, including another data point for the spectacular stupidity of Sam Bankman-Fried, hidden just beneath a sheen of intellect. Premium subscribers can expect a paywalled deep dive on that topic soon.

Six years, 12 kids, and 70 pounds ago, Elon Musk tried to demonstrate that the cybertruck’s windows were bulletproof. They were not.

SBF Thrown in Solitary, Crisis PR Quits after Tucker Interview

Sam Bankman-Fried did another interview in his Donald Trump Please Pardon Me Tour 2025, this time with Tucker Carlson. To be honest I haven’t bothered to watch it yet, because what I’m hearing is that he’s just reiterating the same lame, unconvincing talking points he’s been spouting since before he was even arrested, and which I just waded through an hour of two weeks ago. Nic Carter did watch the interview, and declared Sam’s rightward turn “Not very convincing, bro.”

Far more interesting, though, is the meta: This interview was another patented Bankman-Fried fuckup, as Sam indulges his strange repetition-automatism for blind strategic blundering. On Monday, it came out that Bankman-Fried was thrown in solitary confinement for giving what it turns out was an unauthorized interview with Carlson. Almost as bad, his crisis PR manager quit because apparently he didn’t check the interview through them, either.

(Why do you have a crisis PR manager when you’re already doing 25 years in the pen? I don’t know. How is he paying for a crisis PR manager? Probably with the $10 million gift to his parents that still hasn’t, to my knowledge, been clawed back.)

Anyway the interesting thing here is this: this continues a clear pattern of self-harming behavior by Bankman-Fried. Most closely, it echoes when he leaked Caroline Ellison’s private diary, an absolutely incredible self-own that got his home release revoked and made him look even more like an asshole. Then of course there’s his fixation on the self-soothing lie that his misappropriation was not a crime because “there’s enough there to pay everyone back,” which probably literally got years added to his sentence for perjury when he tried to sell it, with its attendant lies, under oath.

Bankman-Fried only has one playbook, and among its important tenets are: pick one lie and stick with it even when evidence comes out against it, and also never listen to professional advice and also just keep talking, saying more is the solution to everything.

All of these are different ways of expressing an idea at the core of my book, and that I’ll be publishing an excerpt regarding coming up quite soon: Despite his performance of something that looks like awkward autistic genius, in fact, Sam Bankman-Fried is a fucking idiot.

Read More: “Wicker Man: Sam Bankman-Fried as Human Sacrifice”

Bitcoin Reserve? Crypto ‘Stockpile’?

Remember last week when I said Trump’s “Strategic Crypto Reserve” “probably won’t happen”? That went as I expected, and hooboy has the bullshit gamesmanship signalling from the Trump administration come back to eviscerate his crypto supporters as gratifyingly as anything in the broader Trumpist-leopards-eating-faces ouevre. A bunch of Bitcoiners saw the man buy a hamburger and thought he was the second coming of Satoshi. Back in reality, Trump doesn’t use email and Bitcoin is down 22% since the end of January.

Here’s me dumping a tranche of BTC on these gullible losers just a little short of the high. Feels good.

Since the announcement that made it sound like the U.S. Government was going to be acquiring David Sacks’ specific bags, the Trump administration has clarified that Trump basically didn’t mean anything he posted. The actual policy is that the government will hang onto illicitly seized non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies, but will not buy any crypto. (The ‘stockpile’.) And the government will also hang on to seized Bitcoin, and may explore acquiring more, in ways that don’t cost taxpayers anything, which, I don’t know what that means (The ‘reserve’).

Sacks had to come out and deny he had influenced the announcement of a “reserve” made up specifically of his investment Bitwise’s management portfolio, so that’s also fun.

Milei Memecoin Launcher Hayden Davis was an Evangelical Dropout Grifter

While I hold materialist atheists in high contempt, evangelicals are neck-and-neck in the “hubris breeds stupidity” race. Case in point, Hayden Davis, the dropout loser who did enough fraud to singlehandedly crash Argentina’s economy, attended far-right Liberty University for two semesters on a socker scholarship, according to a profile in the Wall Street Journal. That’s how you wind up so stupid you risk political assassination for your shitcoin! He had also participated in a multi-level marketing energy drink company which I’m not legally allowed to denigrate as a pyramid scheme.

Meanwhile, Hayden’s father Tom Davis was a check-kiter and burglar before turning to crypto. And also, yes, attendee of an evangelical bible school. The best people.

Can Tesla Survive a Memetic Death Spiral?

I have a long history with Elon Musk, and with Tesla. My first real foothold in journalism was as a stringer for Fortune from late 2013 to 2018, which included writing a lot about early SpaceX launch attempts and the development and ramp-up for the Tesla Model Y and Model 3. It also included going to College Station, Texas for the first Hyperloop Pod Design Competition in 2016 - and that’s where I first genuinely started to smell a rat.

The Hyperloop, if you remember, was a kitchen-napkin concept that Elon Musk essentially open-sourced and invited other people to work on. At the time, the idea of a vacuum tube shooting a magnetized, pressurized capsule at ultra-high frictionless speed was pretty cool, but it seemed odd that the man who then ran two companies (and now ‘runs’ five or six) would be so hesitant to pursue a new idea that he gave the IP away to other, competing startup founders. Those Hyperloop startups, their names now forgotten, were boondoggles in their own right. As we now know, the real purpose of the Hyperloop was to stall high-speed rail development in California.

By 2019, I’d fully become a Tesla skeptic, and by then I was on staff at Fortune, where one of my big pieces was this analysis of shortfalls in Tesla’s warranty accounting (published in 2020). Car manufacturers are required to pre-fund a portion of the projected costs of honoring their warranties, but Tesla appeared to be, at best, on the low end of the necessary allocations, leaving more money to claim as profit. Tesla spokespeople at the time insisted the lower allowances were because Teslas broke down less, which seemed plausible at the time but it turns out was a total lie!

And through all of this, of course, we were keeping an eye on Full Self Driving (a phrase that walked so that Artificial General Intelligence could run). Elon constantly promised that autonomous driving was imminent, including in late 2019, and of course it’s still not here except in the rather borderline state where it frequently kills people.

Ed Niedermeyer is another longtime Tesla skeptic getting some serious vindication here. On a recent episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, Ed points out that Tesla reaped good PR for many years from the promise that it would someday make an affordable electric car. That promise was already something of a meme (negative connotation) in 2020 when I wrote a list of affordable electrics to buy while you waited for Tesla’s. But for the masses of retail meme (positive connotation) investors that pumped Tesla into the stratosphere during the early days of the pandemic, the foundational lie of a future cheap car was a meaningful part of what they were betting on. So were Elon’s later deceptions about the Cybertruck or humanoid robots.

Point being: When Wired asks What’s Behind Tesla’s Woes?, the answer is that Elon Musk is behind Tesla’s Woes. Not because he’s suddenly a Nazi, but because he’s been lying about the company’s product and roadmap for close to a decade. The Nazi part wouldn’t matter if not for the lies coming home to roost.

And when you lie to pump the valuation of a public company, they come home to roost with a fucking vengeance. Tesla’s off-the-rails P/E ratio means it’s a stock mostly full of hot air, which is now exiting in a gigantic rush. In analyst terms, I see Tesla dropping another ~10% relative to the broader market in the current leg. Not enough to get closer to a reasonable P/E, good lord no. That will take another two or three successive waves of bull capitulation, hacking off another ~10% each go-round.

This isn’t going away. Alex Winter - that’s right, Bill from Bill and Ted - is now helping organize anti-Elon rallies at Tesla dealerships in California, under the Tesla Takeover banner. People are heeding the call to attack their political opponent through his fragile, overleveraged public company, and it’s working. And at the same time, Telsa’s material revenues are also taking a dive, and wow, ouch, profits dropped by half from 2023 to 2024. That is incredibly bad.

So not only is Elon personally hated. Not only are people finally grokking the fact that he’s a habitual liar. The underlying “growth” company is decidedly not growing.

There are no narratives left for Tesla. It’s not morally good. It’s not technically innovative. And it’s not making money relative to its price, even today.

This stock is now dead. It just doesn’t know it yet. With it will go a substantial portion of Elon Musk’s wealth and influence.